The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Today physical and digital items are sold frequently over the internet and online retailers and auction sites have become leading channels for offer and sale. Various retailers may retain websites from which items can be purchased. When a user purchases an item over the internet, a payment is sent to the retailer and the item is either digitally provided to the user or physically shipped to an address of the user. By providing an opportunity for a user to purchase an item over the internet, a retailer is able to reach a broader audience with a particular product.
While many retailers maintain websites for electronic commerce, some retailers are unable to maintain websites for selling goods. Even retailers that maintain websites may have trouble reaching a broad audience with the goods sold on the retailer websites. To solve this problem, listing websites such as AMAZON and EBAY were created to aggregate listings in various categories and act as an intermediary between the seller and the purchaser. Listing websites allow a seller to identify a product for sale. A purchaser may search through products presented by different sellers and select a particular product for purchase. In this manner, purchasers may view a wide array of products from different sellers and a retailer may reach an audience that would have been previously unavailable.
A difficulty arises for a retailer who wishes to coordinate listings between multiple websites. As listing websites become more popular and increase in number, a retailer may wish to sell a product on various listing websites in order to reach a larger audience. As each listing website differs in how a listing is created and stored, selling a product on multiple listing websites requires a retailer to generate different listings for each listing website and update each listing every time one of the listings changes.
An added difficulty arises for a retailer who wishes to sell an item internationally with a listing readable in local languages. Listing websites are generally geographically located in one region. For example, AMAZON has separate retail websites for United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Canada, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Australia, Brazil, Japan, China, India, and Mexico. Thus, if a retailer wishes to sell an item internationally, the retailer would have to translate each listing into at least French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and Hindi and create separate listings for each version of the website. Additionally, if the retailer wished to sell a listing internationally using multiple listing websites for each location, each listing would need to be produced in accordance with the listing requirements for each listing website in each location.
Thus, there is a need for a system that solves the internet based problem of generating listings for multiple types of listing websites and multiple versions of listing websites in multiple languages.